On 7/15/25 9:25 AM, Joe Orton wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 07, 2025 at 06:15:51PM +0200, Ruediger Pluem wrote:
>> Based on the discussion on the support for an old libcurl version with the
>> release currently voted on I would like to start
>> a discussion how long we should support old 3rd party library versions we
>> depend on. I think we should define a set of rules
>> and document them somewhere on the website or in the documentation.
>>
>> Just some rules I quickly thought about as a discussion starter:
>>
>> 1. Do not support versions past 10 years of their release.
>> 2. Eventually shorten 1. if the open source version of the library is
>> unsupported upstream and bugs in the old library prevent
>> things from working any longer.
>
> I think it would make more sense to define minimum supported versions in
> terms of the platforms we want to support, e.g. we expect 2.4.x to run
> on Ubuntu >= A, RHEL >= B, Debian >= C, or similar. This is close to
> what we do in practice already because it's how users consume the code,
> and is testable in CI. Testing against a dozen(?) libraries which are
> ">= N years old" is a moving target and would be near-impossible to
> automate.
>
This sounds like a reasonable plan and idea. Maybe we could choose LTS releases
(if existing in the distro)
and stop supporting stuff as soon as the regular support for the distribution
ends.
Regards
Rüdiger
